5.31.02 PHILADELPHIA PHILLIES vs MONTREAL EXPOS
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Late one afternoon this week the television at Dicky’s, our neighborhood
watering hole, was tuned to the YES channel, which apparently stands for something
like Yankees Every Second. They were replaying the original broadcast of a
game from 1978 in which Ron Guidry struck out 18 Angels. And while I couldn’t
give two craps about Ron Guidry or the 1978 New York Yankees or anything having
to do with them for that matter, it was hard not to get sucked in. For those
of us without regular access to cable TV and the wonders of ESPN Classic,
see, watching a game from 1978 can be a startling experience.
For one thing, the screen is completely empty. There’s no box in the
top corner containing the score, the count, the number of outs, or a graphical
representation of the number and position of any men on base. Nor does the
display intermittently shrink to half its normal size to accommodate scrolling
scores and notes from other games in progress. There’s just, well, the
game, from a noticeably conscribed number of camera angles, annotated every
so often by a few simple words in yellow Helvetica across the bottom of the
screen: “Ron Guidry career high 13 strikeouts,” for example. And,
not to sound stuffy and reactionary and insufferably purist, but it’s
a lovely thing, this broadcast of a baseball game reduced to a broadcast
of a baseball game and nothing more. There’s an economy to it, an
elegance, and the languid quietude that was once associated with a day at
the ballpark. I ate it up.
Funny thing about Veterans Stadium. My friend Bill who was here on a working
holiday and I took the subway from downtown and followed the Phillies fans
up the stairs and there it was, in all its featureless, monolithic glory.
The Vet. The most maligned and longest loathed park in baseball, and not without
reason. You got your cookie-cutter, circular, multipurpose construction. You
got your imposing, soulless, quasi-fascist architecture. You got your upper
deck that’s steeper and higher than the Matterhorn, and your views of nothing,
save the upper deck across from you. You got your artificial turf.
What I mean to say is, you’ll get no argument from me. The place is awful.
But there’s more to the story than that.
We could tell when we went up to the ticket windows. There was the usual
array of different sections and different prices, but for the same eight dollars
that would buy you a 700-level seat—seven hundred level?—you
could instead get something called a general admission ticket. And the general
admission ticket is a refreshing and wonderful thing, as it basically amounts
to a tacit acknowledgement by Phillies management that when your stadium is
consistently running at one-third capacity, fans should be treated like the
proverbial thousand-pound gorilla: you let him sit wherever he wants. In stark
contrast to the treatment afforded fans by the ticket nazis in places like,
oh, Pittsburgh, to name one, the attitude at the Vet could hardly be more
laissez-faire. Except for the very bottom sections of the infield lower level,
we pretty much had the run of the place for eight bucks.
Such contrasts continued inside. I didn’t see any sushi or taco stands, but
we did find excellent, grown-up sized, all-beef hot dogs for three dollars.
The public announcement system didn’t sound like the local megaplex cranking
the latest eight-channel, dynamic digital Bruckheimer disaster, but rather,
sounded like a stadium P.A. The scoreboard did not tell us when to cheer,
and there was no fake noise-meter with the arrow bumping into the red when
we did. There were no commercials, there was no sweeping skyline to gaze at,
there was nothing to distract from what we’d all come for. There was just,
well, a ballgame. Nice, kinda.
Hell, even that Nexturf stuff they put down last season looks pretty good,
at least until the lights come on and it takes on that peculiar sheen. And
Philly fan is an absolute riot. Jesus do they hate Scott Rolen here. And how
they love young Jimmy Rollins, no matter how many times he strikes out swinging
at pitches over his head (three tonight, by my count). And Jeremy Giambi,
recently arrived from Oakland and hailed as the Phillies’ savior, and
acting like it too, blasting a three-run homer in the second to help his new
team close within one after the Expos took a 5–0 lead in the first with
a double, two walks and a pair of home runs off Brandon Duckworth.
Duckworth settled down and the Phillies actually made a game of it, a Pat
Burrell solo shot in the eighth again bringing the Phils within a run after
three more Expos runs had made it 8–6. It was quite a scene going into
the bottom of the ninth, the P.A. blaring Motley Crue and honest-to-god flashes
of lightning crackling above our heads; I’ve certainly never seen a more
pumped group of 15,000 people at an Expos game.
Things got livelier still when Vladimir Guerrero overthrew second base and allowed pinch-hitter Tomas Perez to cruise into third with a one-out triple. Jimmy Rollins struck out again, though, and Marlon Anderson, who’d been making terrific plays all night at second base and contributed a two-run shot in the seventh, popped up harmlessly to center to end the game.
FINAL SCORE: EXPOS 8, PHILLIES 7
LIFE DURING WARTIME: Hey! They actually checked my camera bag!